Book review: When We Cease to Understand the World

Comments on Substack.

Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, is what could be called a “nonfiction novel”. It has real characters inhabiting storylines that are, at least in part, imagined. However, it’s often difficult to pinpoint where the fiction is. The stories about people exhuming Egyptian tombs for nitrogen for fertilizers, Hitler Youth members handing out cyanide capsules to German leadership after a classical concert when the war was all but lost, and Grothendieck demanding to know what a meter is, are all true.

Labatut says that the first chapter is, save a paragraph (I don’t know which one), all true. It is also the most fun. It jumps from topic to topic — suicides in Germany in anticipation of the Red Army’s advance, the history of dyes (especially the invention of Prussian blue, the dye leading to the invention of Prussic acid, more commonly known as cyanide), Alan Turing’s cycling habits, and Fritz Haber’s legacy as both “the man who pulled bread from air” and as the overseer of Germany’s chemical warfare efforts in the First World War.

Later in the book, we meet Karl Schwarzschild of the black hole radius, the enigmatic modern mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki, the preternaturally hard-working Alexander Grothendieck, and the physicists Erwin Schrodinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Louis de Broglie. Grothendieck in particular was very interesting, because I knew the least about him going into this book. The book claims that he “could begin working out an idea in the morning and not move from his desk until dawn the next day”, “did not read newspapers, watch television or go to the cinema” and “devoted the whole of his energy, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, to mathematics”, produced Einstein-grade research, and finally abandoned mathematics to live the life of a hippie convinced that the environment had its own consciousness. So hippie was he that after a severe motorcycle accident, he “declined anaesthesia, and agreed only to acupuncture during his surgery, as he had grown almost indifferent to physical pain”.

Sadly, the latter parts of the book focus too much on the characters being horrified by uninterpretability in science. Heisenberg is upset about quantum uncertainty, Einstein is famously so, Grothendieck is horrified by math’s “heart of the heart”, and the final chapter (which is 100% fiction) is the most on-the-nose about it:

[I]t was mathematics—not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate 187Armageddon—which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we would simply not be able to grasp what being human really meant. Not that we ever did, he said, but things are getting worse. We can pull atoms apart, peer back at the first light and predict the end of the universe with just a handful of equations, squiggly lines and arcane symbols that normal people cannot fathom, even though they hold sway over their lives. But it’s not just regular folks; even scientists no longer comprehend the world. Take quantum mechanics, the crown jewel of our species, the most accurate, far-ranging and beautiful of all our physical theories. It lies behind the supremacy of our smartphones, behind the Internet, behind the coming promise of godlike computing power. It has completely reshaped our world. We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it. The mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions. It’s as if the theory had fallen to earth from another planet, and we simply scamper around it like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.

Physics has become too much like “deducing all the rules of Wimbledon—the number of sets, the length of the grass, the tension of the nets and even the mandatory white that players have to wear—from the few balls that flew out of the stadium, without ever having witnessed what takes place on the court”. This quote is similar to the one by Alan Turing that opens Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon:

There is a remarkably close parallel between the problems of the physicist and those of the cryptographer. The system on which a message is enciphered corresponds to the laws of the universe, the intercepted messages to the evidence available, the keys for a day or a message to important constants which have to be determined. The correspondence is very close, but the subject matter of cryptography is very easily dealt with by discrete machinery, physics not so easily.

Personally, I am not sure scientists lose much sleep over theories being counterintuitive when they lead to correct predictions. At least, I don’t. Is it very surprising that the intuitions which evolved in the ancestral environment fail us in the subatomic realm, which was too small to be observed until a couple hundred years ago? Our intuitions work quite well for classical physics. They fail us again in electromagnetics, many of which field’s effects we observed only in the last few centuries. My view here is similar to the character Ava’s in Rebecca Goldstein’s novel The Mind-Body Problem, which I also reviewed recently: “What makes logic so absolute? Physical facts come first. Logic has to conform to them.”

Striking facts from the book

Burying Goring

The Allied forces went to painstaking lengths to hide Hermann Goring’s remains, but they still remain an active subject of collectionism:

They removed the shards of glass from his lips [from the cyanide capsule Goring had bit on to kill himself] and sent his clothing, personal effects and naked body to the municipal crematorium at the Ostfriedhof cemetery in Munich, where one of the gigantic ovens was fired up to incinerate Göring, mingling his ashes with those of thousands of political prisoners and opponents of the Nazi regime decapitated at Stadelheim prison, the handicapped children and psychiatric patients murdered by the Aktion T4 euthanasia programme, and countless victims of the concentration camp system. His remains were scattered late at night in the waters of the Watzenbach, a small brook chosen from a map at random. But these efforts were in vain: to this day, collectors from all over the world continue to exchange keepsakes and belongings of the last great leader of the Nazis, commander of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s natural successor. In June 2016, an Argentine man paid more than three thousand euros for a pair of the Reichsmarschall’s silk underpants. Months later, that same man spent twenty-six thousand euros on the copper and zinc cylinder that had once concealed the glass vial Göring ground between his teeth on October 15, 1946.

The Nazi mass suicide

The Nazi elite died by collectively taking cyanide pills. They did so after a specially organized concert by the Berlin Philharmonic:

Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and War Production and official architect of the Third Reich, organized a special programme that included Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major, followed by Brückner’s Fourth Symphony—The Romantic—and ending, appropriately, with Brünnhilde’s aria, which closes the third act of Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, in which the Valkyrie immolates herself on an enormous funeral pyre, the flames of which spread to consume not only the world of men but the halls of Valhalla and the entire pantheon of the gods. When the audience filed towards the exits, Brünnhilde’s cries of pain still resounding in their ears, members of the Deutsches Jungvolk—a section of the Hitler Youth composed of children under ten, as the teenagers were already off dying at the barricades—handed out cyanide capsules in small wicker baskets, like votive offerings at mass. Göring, Goebbels, Bormann and Himmler used these capsules to commit suicide, but many of the Nazi leaders chose to shoot themselves in the head at the same moment they bit down, afraid that they had been sabotaged, that the capsules were deliberately adulterated to provoke not the painless, instant death that they desired but the slow agony they deserved. Hitler became so convinced that his dosage had been tampered with that he chose to test its effectiveness on his beloved Blondi, a German shepherd that had accompanied him to the Führerbunker, where she slept at the foot of his bed, enjoying privileges of all kinds.

Turing’s cycling

Alan Turing used to ride to his office in Bletchley Park on a “bicycle with a defective chain that he refused to repair. Rather than taking it to the workshop, he would calculate the number of revolutions the chain could withstand, and would jump off and adjust it seconds before it came loose.”

Schwarzschild’s math obsession

Karl Schwarzschild really liked math:

[D]uring an expedition to the Alps, at the invitation of his brother Alfred, he ordered their guides to loosen the ropes at the most dangerous part of a glacier crossing, putting the entire expedition at risk, merely so that he could get closer to two of his colleagues and solve a problem that they had been working on together, by scraping equations into the permafrost with their pickaxes.

Halley’s Comet

Halley’s Comet appears as the Star of Bethlehem in Giotto’s “The Adoration of the Magi“.

Humanity has had a weird thing for Halley’s Comet since antiquity. The Comet was probably the Star of Bethlehem from Christianity’s Nativity story. Labatut repeats the legend that in 1222, it was an appearance of the Comet that inspired Genghis Khan to invade Europe.

Louis de Broglie’s memory

As a child, much like young John von Neumann, Louis de Broglie “had a prodigious memory”. He could recite “entire scenes of classical theatre” and “the names of all the ministers of the Third Republic”. Also like Johnny, he “showed a particular liking for history and politics”.

Fritz Haber’s legacy

A first-hand quoted account of chemical warfare in Ypres is harrowing:

In less than a minute they started with the most rifle and machine gun fire that I had ever heard. … They couldn’t possibly see what they were shooting at. In about fifteen minutes the gunfire petered out. … When we got to the French lines the trenches were empty but in a half mile the bodies of French soldiers were everywhere. … You could see where men had clawed at their faces, and throats, trying to breathe. Some had shot themselves.

Fritz Haber. Via Wikimedia.

The Ypres attack was overseen by the chemist Fritz Haber, whose legacy includes heading the Chemistry section of the German Ministry of War, and a Nobel for “the most important chemical discovery of the twentieth century”: the Haber-Bosch process, a way to obtain nitrogen for fertilizer directly from the air. He was the “’the man who pulled bread from air’, in the words of the press of the day”, and enabled “the demographic explosion that took the human population from 1.6 to 7 billion in fewer than one hundred years”. Before Haber, obtaining fertilizer was complicated:

Europe’s insatiable hunger had driven bands of Englishmen as far as Egypt to despoil the tombs of the ancient pharaohs, in search not of gold, jewels or antiquities, but of the nitrogen contained in the bones of the thousands of slaves buried along with the Nile pharaohs, as sacrificial victims, to serve them even after their deaths.

Haber’s wife was against his chemical weapons program:

Clara accused him of perverting science by devising a method for exterminating human beings on an industrial scale. Haber ignored her: for him, war was war and death was death, regardless of the means of its infliction. He used his two days’ furlough to invite his friends to a party that lasted until dawn, and, at its end, his wife walked down to the garden, took off her shoes, and shot herself in the chest with her 27husband’s service revolver. She bled to death in the arms of their thirteen-year-old son, who had run downstairs when he heard the shot. Still in shock, Fritz Haber had to travel the following day to oversee a gas attack on the eastern front.

When the Second World War began, Haber was persecuted in Germany for his Jewish roots. He fled to Britain, where he was scorned for his role in chemical warfare. The rest of his life he spent moving from country to country. After his death, the Nazis used one of his inventions, a cyanide-based pesticide, to kill his own extended family:

[T]he Nazis would use in their gas chambers the pesticide he had helped create to murder his half-sister, his brother-in-law, his nephews and countless other Jews who died hunkered down, muscles cramping, skin covered with red and green spots, bleeding from their ears, spitting foam from their mouths, the young ones crushing the children and the elderly as they attempted to scale the heap of naked bodies and breathe a few more minutes, a few more seconds, because Zyklon B tended to pool on the floor after being dropped through hatches in the roof.